Thursday, October 29, 2015

Week 43 - Offboarding and Cats

To say the week was nuts is an understatement. I haven’t had
a work week so busy in decades. Literally. It reminded me of my days at Brown,
when I was much younger and had more energy. At least it went by quickly.

It was all the offboarding meetings that kept me hopping,
with training classes added in for extra measure. I had at least one offboarding session every day
except Thursday and two some days. Several were on East Campus which added a
drive to the already 2 hour commitment when you figured set up time and staying
late for questions. Then there was all the email follow up. I was looking
forward to Thursday with no meetings or trainings but by the time I got done
with offboarding follow up, it was 3:30. So much for my free day.

To add to all the offboarding fun, someone reported that
there was a friendly cat in the parking garage. Since one of Husker Cats’ rules
is that we’ll remove friendly cats who end up (dumped most likely) on campus, I
emailed the garage feeder and the TNR (trap/neuter/release) coordinator to have
them keep an eye out. The person who reported it had also checked for it again
with no luck. I had gone to a movie Tuesday night after work and decided to see
if I could find the cat after working hours when the garage would be quieter. I
didn’t think I would so only brought a little baggie of food. Of course I
stepped off the elevator and there he was. I walked toward him, calling him and
he responded by meowing so this wasn’t a feral cat. I put some food down and he
came right over and let me pet him. But did I have a carrier with me? Nope.

I started making calls and finally got Belinda, who said she’d
get dressed and bring me a carrier. I picked him up and put him in it no
problem but Belinda looked at me and said, “I’m not taking him!” so now I had
to take him home. He was a dream in the car and I quickly set up a litter box,
food and water in my bathroom. It was almost 9:00 before I got him settled. He
was a dirty mess (he might have hitched a ride under the hood of someone’s car)
but sweet as all get out and didn’t make a peep all night, probably because he
was in a food coma after all he ate. I had made arrangements to drop him at the
vet’s back in Lincoln Wednesday morning before work. At least he’d be out of my
house and I was hoping someone would offer to foster him so he wouldn’t be my
problem.

So here’s how Wednesday went… I dropped the cat at the vet on the
south side of Lincoln before 8:00 and got to East Campus for an offboarding
session at 8:15, thinking I’d have time to check email but we had technical
difficulties so only got up and running minutes before the session started.
There were 40-50 people in the room plus the outstations were participating via
Adobe Connect so there were lots of questions. I was back at my desk for about
20 minutes before I had to leave for a lunch meeting for UAAD (the professional
organization on campus that I used to be president of) because I’d asked the
new accountant to go so couldn’t bail. I left that early (it was a fun demo of
drones by a computer science grad student) and had a training session with Nora
across campus, which went until 3:30. By the time I got back to my desk, I was
exhausted. Monday and Tuesday were fall break so we didn’t have swimming and I
had intended to swim Wednesday but couldn’t muster the energy. Just two more work days to
go.

UNL’s student knitting group was having a yarn swap on
Friday after work so I had gone through all my basement yarn and had 2 big bags
to drop off (I didn’t want any yarn in return) plus 2 bags from Donna, who had
gone through her yarn while moving. More output from my house, so all good and
a nice way to start the weekend.

I usually talk to Carolyn first thing on Saturday but she
emailed that she’d be calling later so I got up and got busy with chores. By
the time she called, I had finished everything except the laundry, which I planned to do on Sunday. That left me thinking I could do something fun Saturday so I called
Andrea, who had emailed info earlier in the week about a sale in Seward. She
was in so I picked her up at 1:00 when her shop closed and off we went. We
stopped at the sale in Seward then hit the Mennonite thrift shop, which is
always fun and didn’t disappoint. I bought all kinds of fun things including a
funky 70’s quilt top, 2 vintage aprons, a fun jacket and a few other things.
Then we headed to Spindle, Shuttle and Needle (a yarn shop) in Stromsburg. I
bought yarn (did you ever doubt it?) and then we hit the local grocery store,
which the yarn shop owner had said was fun and it was. They had a butcher
counter with all kinds of fun specialty meats, nice produce and a Swedish
section. I bought the lemon I went in for and a bag of all kinds of other
things. What a nice and unplanned afternoon! It was perfect fall weather so
great for a country drive.

All that fun and I still had Sunday for laundry, knitting
and cooking. I needed that after the week I’d had. It was my last day of the
rotation so I made a pumpkin cake to take to knitting. The one downer of the
day was finding Pie with her her jaw stuck open again around dinner time. She wouldn’t let me near her to try to
wrangle it shut, which I’d successfully done last time it happened. I was up
late trying to get her in and would have to deal with it in the morning. Oh
well. It figures I’d have a cat with TMJ! More on that in next week’s post.